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Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher’s Role in the Writing Class Lad Tobin

In response to a student essay espousing the position that writing in one’s own voice is a more authentic and effective means of communicating than conforming to an imposed academic format; Tobin compiled a list of cautions for those who teach and rate students’ writing. The student author compared Tobin’s course writing requirements to those of a science instructor in the same institution, sparking introspection and caution in Tobin’s mind.

He contends that teachers need to be aware of the potential to be swayed by the content of a student’s paper. He found himself influenced to think more highly of a paper containing opinions and a position with which he agreed. In the opposite manner, he discussed the tendency to think less highly of a paper in which the contents seem trivial to the grader. What is trivial to one person can be of the utmost important to another. Graders must be aware of personal bias.

Tobin’s second caution came as he warned against the tendency to allow feelings of validation as an instructor, by virtue of a paper’s content, to cause one to lose objectivity when grading. He found his response to one paper influenced by a student author's well expressed preference for his course and writing requirements over those of another instructor. Just because the content made him feel more valued as an instructor, was not a valid reason to score the writing with high marks.

Thirdly, he delved into the dangers of being overly lenient in scoring due to having knowledge of a student’s personal issues, challenges or background. Tobin detailed ways in which such knowledge could bias one’s thinking in favor of a student, possibly causing the grader to award a higher score as a result. He cautioned that we must be mindful to score the paper in an objective manner.

Tobin also spoke of “misreading the text” as a way to describe the process in which a reader deconstructs and reconstruct meaning in the act of reading. However, the author also explains a “Catch 22” in this writing instructor/grader role that teachers play. “This kind of enthusiasm for composition does not seem possible to teachers who have scrupulously sought to remove themselves and their own interests from the course. By remaining detached in this way, by refusing to misread essays in personal and playful ways, we make composition an unpleasant duty – for our students and for ourselves. Tobin reminds us to aim for a balance.

I felt his discussion of the idea that psychotherapy is not the object of a writing lesson, but that literate writing is, was overworked and too lengthy. Perhaps this is the reason that those middle pages were absent in the first copy of the article I picked up. As a result, Tobin’s arguments were contradictory at times. However, his overall cautions against personal bias when scoring were well stated and worth serious consideration by all who are responsible for scoring student writing.

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Marguerite (Meg) Rice SCKWP – Buhler – June-July 2007